Unemployable
We all need money to live. A fact of our current society that I have an unending amount of disdain for. We have to ask money for the right to live. We are told we have ‘freedom’ with the underlying message being work or die.
Work or die. Can we just take a second to ponder how insane our vocabulary around work is: ‘living wage’, ‘earn a living’, ‘in my free time’.
Finding a job that pays you a living wage is difficult already, for autistic individuals, it is a waking nightmare. “Autism unemployment was approximately 85% in 2021, and research shows Autistic individuals face higher unemployment rates and social isolation than other disabilities.”(1) 85% of all autistic individuals are either unemployed or underemployed, meaning they don’t make enough money to live independently. This is the statistic for diagnosed autistic individuals, many many undiagnosed individuals are struggling with this as well. Oh but don’t be mistaken in thinking a diagnosis would suddenly open a magical door into a welcoming host of accommodations and resources, far from it. There is very little to no help for autistic adults.
This is reflected in the high unemployment rate, high rate of comorbid conditions, and high suicide rate of autistic adults:
“50% of individuals with ASD had four or more comorbid conditions.”(2)
“Studies have shown that an alarming 66% of autistic adults have thought of taking their own life, and an alarming 35% have attempted suicide.”(3)
What is going on?
Why are many autistic adults considered ‘unemployable’? And what does that really mean? To understand this let’s start by breaking down what an average job looks like. In the present, with prices continually rising and wages remaining stagnant, many people are having to work more hours, or more than one job, and still can’t afford everything they need. “According to a 2019 Gallup Poll, 52% percent of full-time workers report working more than 40 hours a week, and 18% work at least 60.”(4)
For the sake of an example let’s say you need to work around 50 hours a week at one or two jobs to make a ‘livable wage’. Let’s say this job is in-person so you are commuting five plus days a week. Now let’s add in everything else you need to live like grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning your house, cleaning yourself, exercising, getting enough rest, spending time with loved ones, taking care of kids and pets, and everything else that is actual life outside of the artificial confines of work. This is truly not sustainable for anyone.
Now imagine an autistic individual who has been uncomfortable and often confused in this society since day one. Everything is too bright, too noisy, too much all the time. Our nervous systems are almost always on edge. We experience frequent shutdowns/meltdowns when our nervous system is overwhelmed and these are often misunderstood by people around us and even seen as problematic. We mask to try and seem ‘normal’ and this takes so much energy out of us that we fall into long burnout periods where we barely have the energy to be alive and often can’t even take care of ourselves properly.
Autism is still so misunderstood by many that we are often told what we are feeling is wrong, that we are being difficult, that we don’t have as many ‘issues’ as we say we do, and the gaslighting goes on. Many autistic individuals end up gaslighting themselves too because of this.
Saying one thing and meaning another is the pastime of the ‘neuronormative’ way our society runs. Everything we are expected to do, but truthfully threatened at risk of houselessness, jail, or death, to do to keep up with the ‘rat race’ of just surviving doesn’t make any rational sense. Many autistic individual’s main drivers are seeking truth and justice. We have strong pattern recognition skills with a tendency to be very honest. Knowing these traits you might be able to start understanding why so many of us have a difficult time staying employed.
If you are going to request something from an autistic individual, in a work setting or otherwise, “the request needs to tick three boxes: be reasonable, fair, and true. The reason our need for those three simple requirements is portrayed as black-and-white thinking or rigidity of thought is that so little of what is asked of us in modern society can tick all the boxes .”(5)
The neurodivergent mind does not conform to the compliance model of our society. I am autistic and ADHD myself. As a kid in school I never had any problem calling out and questioning authority figures. I questioned all of the arbitrary rules at school and refused to follow them if no one offered a good explanation as to why the rule was necessary. This meant I spent a lot of time in the principal’s office and detention. As an adult, these same traits have played out. I have had a lot of jobs for a 25-year-old. This is partially due to my shifting interests. As James Baldwin said, “I do not dream of labor”. I am a creative and would much rather spend all my time doing whatever form of art I feel like that day and just generally wandering around. Nonetheless, I have still had many regular jobs, none of which I have stayed at for more than a year. Either because the environment was so unbearable for me I quit or I was fired. The times I was fired it was usually due to me calling out some inequity I saw that I couldn’t keep quiet about. Such as calling out unequal pay for the same job, boss keeping employees tips, and the list goes on. This isn’t just some unique circumstance I found myself in. This is every workplace, yes yours too.
“Selling our time rather than doing things for their own sake, we come to evaluate our lives on the basis of how much we can get in exchange for them, not what we get out of them. As freelance slaves hawking our lives hour by hour, we think of ourselves as each having a price; the amount of the price becomes our measure of value. In that sense, we become commodities, just like toothpaste and toilet paper. What once was a human being is now an employee, in the same way that what once was a pig is now a pork chop. Our lives disappear, spent like the money for which we trade them.”(6)
We rent ourselves out and spend more hours than anything else in our lives toiling away making a profit that will we never see, we are then given a pitiful amount of that pie called a wage, and then expected to buy the goods we need to survive, the goods we as the working class made with our labor, back from the capitalists. We comply with this insane cycle that can only be kept up by a staggering amount of cognitive dissonance over and over again, looking forward to when we can retire, maybe, and get to enjoy our lives. That’s wild.
I can’t speak for all autistic individuals but I can speak for myself, ever since I was old enough to have thoughts and be able to analyze them absolutely none of this has made any sense whatsoever. I have always asked questions trying to find any sense of rationality in the way we live so I can justify it to myself and get on with living “normally” like everyone else seems to be able to do and I have not found a single rational answer in response and believe me I have tried.
I often hit burnout, I’ve been in a phase of autistic burnout for close to a year now. This is because I have had to muster up so much energy that I don’t have, put on a fake smile, act like someone other than myself, ignore all of the stimuli that make me uncomfortable, ignore engaging in my stims that help me regulate my nervous system while in public so I don’t get rude looks and comments, and try to decode all of this nonsense just to still not even do very well in this society and still get told I’m difficult, lazy, and that something is wrong with me and I need to be fixed.
In our society, it is ok for someone to not be doing well for a little while but not for years on end, you become a burden. The result of having an ‘invisible disability’, which many high-masking individuals like myself do, is that even people who know what is going on with me don’t fully believe how much I struggle a lot of the time even when I explain it over and over again. It is utterly exhausting.
Many autistic individuals are considered ‘unemployable’ because of all of this. We get discriminated against because the way we work is different than the ‘neurotypical’ expectation, for having shutdowns/meltdowns that others refuse to try and understand, for having “rigid, black-and-white” thinking that leads us to question things that need to be questioned in workplaces anyways, and oftentimes we don’t even get offered the job in the first place due to many of the factors being used to evaluate job candidates having more to do with adherence to ‘social norms’ than what the job actually entails.
We live in an ableist society that doesn’t want to accommodate individuals with different needs than whatever the ‘norm’ is considered to be at the time but also requires everyone to work for a wage as there is a paywall on ALL basic necessities we need to live. The government then makes qualifying for disability benefits extremely difficult and if you are high-masking like me and especially if you are female presenting it is difficult to get any recognition or accommodations for the struggles associated with being autistic at all.
“It is estimated that over 50% of people in prison have a neurodiverse condition.” (7) “There is also evidence that neurodivergent people are at a higher risk of being homeless. For example, research estimates that about 12% of people experiencing homelessness are autistic, compared to 1–2% of the general population. People with ADHD are also at a greater risk of becoming homeless.”(8)
I encourage you to look into the social model of disability. I also encourage you to learn more about autism and to ask yourself, how can we make life more accessible for everyone? The status quo of trying to force everyone into one way of living and working and then pathologizing them if they can’t fit into that box has to die.
“The survival of the human species now depends on evolving new collaborative social operating systems that are based on mutual support rather than on social power gradients and a myth of meritocracy.”(9)
Yes, I am very negative about the state of our world because it is negative. However, I do have hope that we will establish new ways of living with a foundation of taking care of each other rather than seeing each other as competition. A better way of life is not only possible but necessary. We will get there.
Everyone has a seat at the table, everyone’s voice deserves to be heard, and everyone deserves to have what they need to live a comfortable life. No one should have to prove their worth. Have this on repeat in your head. All the messaging around us tells us otherwise. You are worthy. You don’t need a ‘good’ job or a certain amount of money, or a house or anything to prove yourself. You are worthy just for being you. The more you recognize that the more you can extend that same kindness to others.
Love is the Revolution.
Sincerely,
Your friendly but fed-up AuDHD neighbor
Works Cited
1.https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferpalumbo/2021/04/27/why-autism-speaks-is-encouraging-companies-to-hire-those-on-the-autistic-spectrum/?sh=7701915e52a2 Jennifer Palumbo, 2021
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-023-02374- w#:~:text=%5B12%5D%20found%20that%20over%2050,these%20different%20comorbidities%20and%20ASD Translational Psychiatry, 2023
3. https://www.autistica.org.uk/our-research/research-projects/understanding-suicide-in-autism Dr. Sarah Cassidy, 2017
4. https://news.gallup.com/poll/267206/women-hourly-workers-less-satisfied-job-aspects.aspx Gallup, 2019
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPRa6G2a48E&list=PLByMN_706TuymaMipLRfxrzyT2q8q6OKA&index=6
6. Crimethinc. Workers’ Collective, Work: Capitalism, Economics, Resistance (CrimethInc. Ex-workers’ Collective; 2019).
7. https://revolving-doors.org.uk/recognise-neurodiversity-multiple-disadvantage/ Revolving Doors UK, 2022
8. https://www.ndti.org.uk/news/blog-research-on-homelessness-and-neurodiversity#:~:text=There%20is%20also%20evidence%20that,greater%20risk%20of%20becoming%20homeless National Development Team for Inclusion, 2023
9. https://autcollab.org/2020/04/30/autism-the-cultural-immune-system-of-human-societies/ Jorn Bettin, 2020
